Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/189

Mr. Birdlip was a good old man, of unimpeachable simplicity. He had achieved enormous wealth in an honourable business, and then found (to his mild distress) that the great traffic he had built up conducted itself automatically. He had, in a way, been gently shouldered out of his own nest by the capable men whose fortunes he had made. But his zealous and frugal spirit required some sort of problem to feed upon, and he delighted his heart by owning a newspaper. The Evening Lens was his toy and the child of his dotage.

So the Persian rugs and walnut panelling of his private suite in the huge Birdlip Building saw him rarely. He was supremely happy in the dingy sanctum at the back of the old Lens office, where the hum of the presses and the racket of the city room (which he still, by an innocent misunderstanding, called the "sitting room") delighted his guileless heart. He would sit turning over the pages of each edition as it came upstairs